


Is Someone There?

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:41:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22165831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: A scholam headmaster burns the midnight oil, unable to puzzle out the meaning behind a child's drawing.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	Is Someone There?

Norvan Taram had a problem.

This was, it must be said, not an uncommon place for the headmaster of Emperor’s Light (Education Primaris) to find himself. Familiar were the roads that led here, though they usually had more to do with the scholam budget, turnover of staff, and the almost-supernatural vanishing of prayer wine from the chapel. These were familiar because they were real problems, involving real people in the real world.

Taram knew how to deal with real things. You didn’t claw your way up through the murky politics and infighting of public institution without knowing how to handle reality. It was when he encountered the strange and unusual that he found himself at a loss.

He scratched his head. He picked up the sheet of rude butcher’s paper from his desk. He looked. He put it down again. He took a slug of prayer wine straight from the bottle.

It wasn’t that Emperor’s Light hadn’t seen children with overactive imaginations before. For a matter of fact, it wasn’t that they hadn’t seen more than one particularly ‘gifted’ student called from class into the company of very severe, _very_ silent women in black gowns. That was, well, it was _real_. It was a fact of life when you lived in the Imperium. It was just how things were in the lower spires of Hive Cerandos. You expected these things. They happened.

But that didn’t mean Taram had to _like_ them.

It really shouldn’t have come to him at all. It should have been stopped in Room Three, a swift corporal punishment issued by the instructor, and a discipline notation in the class log. Taram should have remained blissfully unaware of anything untoward.

The problem was, it involved flowers. Room Three had a small grow-lumen and a box of untainted soil in which bloomed a rather delightful strain of mother-shade. The students were rostered to keep the shoots watered and pruned as a duty-and-mindfulness exercise, with the added benefit of having a splash of colour amongst drab and peeling browns. The protection of their little project was fierce: had another class even been suspected of tampering, there would have been fist-fighting in the halls.

Yet a petal had been plucked without anyone seeing. The class had been set to drawing heroic figures of the Imperium - revered Saints, most holy generals, and local governors. Each sketch was done on butcher’s paper with rough charcoal. The well-off children drew what they had glimpsed in family books or on stained-glass windows, while the poorer of the Hive made do with copying those more fortunate.

One picture had been of something that would never be in a book of Imperial scripture - at least, not the tame, edited kind found in the lower spires. Certainly nothing in the scholam’s own librarium.

One picture had been coloured something other than harsh black. The mother-shade petals had been crushed onto the paper, a blue as rich and dark as poisoned berries, spread carefully to fill the space between lines. Like blood beneath the skin…

Taram shook his head. Those were thoughts from another life.

 _That_ was the heart of the problem. The thin-lipped instructor had sent the girl who’d drawn the picture - Marya Lucan - home before bringing the picture to the headmaster. The instructor hadn’t recognised it for what it was.

A strange lightness in his hand. Was the bottle empty already? How late was it? The candles in the office were burning low - Taram swore he’d lit them only… well, it was in his purview to budget for new ones. A few candles and a bottle of wine was a small price to pay for peace of mind, though he’d found precious little of that tonight, all told.

The headmaster took a small copper key from an inside jacket pocket. It fitted the top drawer of his worktable, opening with a click and a squeak. He pushed aside a tangle of yellowing school reports, dated from before the Great Rift. Beneath was a bottle of the good stuff, a fine Coderian vintage he’d been gifted as a retirement present. Next to it, less well-loved, were his lieutenant’s rank pins - and the sinister grip of his service laspistol.

Taram had his suspicions on why they let officers keep their guns when they mustered out. Those suspicions ran to the generous pension the Munitorum required him to sign for each quarter - and to the state of mind a man or woman released from service was likely to be in.

Or perhaps it was just to be a memento. Something to be proud of, something that proved he’d _been_ there, that he’d survived.

And he _had_ survived. Hadn’t he?

The things he’d seen - the things he’d killed - they were part of another life, now. They were out _there_ , out in the cold and dark, far away from civilised worlds. They weren’t _allowed_ to be here. It had taken Taram a long time, and many visits to a patient ex-Militarum medic, to be able to sleep a full night under the new and unfamiliar ceiling of his hab-block. Without a regiment of soldiers around him, to protect him from the things out there…

Taram’s hands shook slightly as he uncorked the bottle. A little of the alcohol splashed across his desk, the wood greedily drinking in the amber liquid.

He recognised the picture.

Not in the way many other officers of the Astra Militarum would. They would see it and say, ah yes - the fabled Adeptus Astartes. They would say: yes, this is clearly a model of powered armour, and the pauldrons - Emperor, they’d exclaim - imagine the weight of all that ceramite! Could stop a tank round, one would say, and then the rest of the night would be spent in spirited argument over whether they _really_ could, how one of them had seen a Space Marine grazed by a Leman Russ and run on to dismantle the tank with his bare hands….

But they would be wrong.

They would say: a damn close attempt by the young lass, isn’t it? Bit rough around the edges, but how old is she, what, eight? Nine? Can’t blame her for accuracy, eh? Hard to sketch off the memory of some grainy prop-vid, or one of those holo-speeches the Lord Commander has shot off to all corners of the Imperium. And those projectors - well, they’re old, they’re saturated, it’s a wonder she didn’t colour it in black, rather than Ultramarine blue!

His mouth was dry no matter how much of the bottle went into it.

They would be wrong.

The colour, the mother-shade, the darkest blue, the blood beneath the skin, the promise of screams to come - she had been right. She had been exactly right, because Taram still saw that colour in his dreams. The ones he woke from, unable to breathe, piss pooling in his breeches, knowing - _knowing_ \- what happened to those who made a sound.

But silence hadn’t been a friend. It had been merely the second of enemies, trumped only by the dark of that damned world. The silence bore down like a crushing weight, it held you in a vice, it made you so utterly, utterly alone, that you could not help but to speak, to ask, to hear anything but the sound of your own panicked heartbeat-

‘Is someone there?’ Taram whispered into the shadowed corners of his office.

The candles flickered, guttered.

The fine hairs on arms and neck rose.

The darkness _hummed_.

‘Yes,’ it whispered back.

It came from the shadows as though born from them, as though it had only just been brought into existence for this one, terrible moment. It came from the darkness cast by Tamar himself, his own long, dragging cloak. It came not for vengeance but for taste - he had been allowed to ferment, his fear to ripen on the vine and now, now, now - he would be plucked, tasted, devoured.

The candles went out. True darkness fell about its shoulders like a coronation, on its brow like a crown’s antithesis. There was a tortured regality to it - something fine that had been broken and now mocked its prior perfection by the sin of existence.

There was only silence.

Death came, in midnight clad.


End file.
